Shortly after the financial implosion of the late 2000s and the beginning of the ‘great recession’, physicist & banker Chris Arnade began long walks around New York City to contemplate the ramifications of his and his ‘industry’s’ reckless speculation and general chicanery. This contemplation was not abstract and intellectual, but all too real as he strayed into parts of the Bronx like Hunts Point that everyone advised him to avoid – -being the province of whores, druggies, and hoods. Quitting his job and ignoring such advice, he began spending his days among modern America’s untouchables, becoming part of their lives even as their stories altered the way he regarded 21st century America’s narrative about itself. Becoming intimately involved with the people at the Point, seeing them as unique persons instead of a class to be dismissed or a problem to be solved inspired him to begin visiting other areas of the country that had been left behind by globalization and willfully ignored by the power-elite of DC and New York. Hanging out in dive bars, fast food restaurants, and churches — places he previously sneered at — he heard still more stories and engaged in largely deep reflection. His account of this five years project is often powerful and insightful, but it has some significant weaknesses towards the end, as part of Arnade’s reformed narrative begin telling the story more than the people themselves. Arnade realizes as his project develops that American society has been totally materialized, reordered purely to serve an economy that an increasingly rarefied few benefit from. The shifting of factories to Mexico, China, etc has not merely forced people out of work: it has destroyed the communities those places were built around. Access is controlled by credentials that are difficult for those from America’s dying places to obtain, and despite the easy advice handed out from the deracinated white-collar elite, it’s not easy to simply leave a place. Not only is moving difficult and expensive, but for those on the margins their Places provide the only support they know — not just family and friends, but the little communities that develop in churches and bars and parks where they can exchange information or provide for one another’s needs. That support isn’t just material, though, it’s emotional and personal: people hang out at the corner and smoke because the people there know and accept them, and don’t treat them as burdensome clients and compel them to navigate arcane mazes of paperwork. In addition, the migratory elite fail to realize that for some people, material goods aren’t the chief end of man. People have strong connections to their places and their people, and will persist in loyalty to them and continue trying to keep them alive. I was impressed by Arnade’s willingness to devote long hours to developing friendships with people who were completely removed from his world, and when he does devote time he develops considerable insight. That approach and level of observation is not consistent, however. As someone born and raised in Selma, Alabama, I looked forward to his visit there with great interest — only to find his time there minimal, and his conversations utterly shallow. When he visited Gary, Indiana and people there declared that all its problems were created by white flight following the first black mayor being elected, I raised a skeptical eye. When he visited Selma and heard the same exact thing, my dubiousness was confirmed — for Selma’s economic decline began long before the election of James Perkins in 2000, and its entire leadership was already predominately black a decade before that, and longstanding companies failed in Selma for the same reason they failed elsewhere: changing economies. Selma was bypassed by the interstates, and places like the American Candy Company fell prey to competition from China. Many of his interviews appeared to have taken place in Selmont, not Selma, and the picture they paint is patronizing and ignorant. Frankly, this insultingly cavalier treatment of one of the most important cities in the Civil Rights movement cast a dark cloud over not only what remained of the book, but what I’d read before. He accepted these claims without question or comment in part because he’d already developed a narrative that the psuedo-meritocratic system created by the elites is especially harmful to minorities and therefore racist. (As usual, the white working class might as well not exist, despite Arnade’s token interviews with a few men near a Trump rally.) Despite the huge pockmarks that erupted there, I still found the book compelling.
On a lighter note, I recently finished listening to Whispers of the Gods, consisting of interviews with the men who played baseball in the 1940s and 1950s. It’s enjoyable enough, but I was hoping for something like the audiobook of The Glory of their Times, which had the actual interview audio. There are few things better to me than listening to old men telling stories, except maybe watching young women sing. Whispers has the stories but we don’t get the actual men telling them, and the narrator’s use of inflection/emotive emphasis/etc is liable to be very different. The content itself is interesting, though: one player was obsessed with Shoeless Joe and (in his youth) hunted down one of Jackson’s contemporaries to get the real scoop on the Black Sox affair. The contemporary believed that Jackson was used as a scapegoat. I’d also never heard of the Mexican League, which was started by two Mexican businessmen (brothers) and tried to recruit American ballplayers from both the Negro and Major leagues in the U.S. Unsurprisingly, the MLB resisted the poaching of their players, imposing five-year suspensions on any player who tried to cross the Rio Grande. There’s also disagreement between the interviewed players over matters like the introduction of Jackie Robinson: some said there wasn’t any hazing, some said there was hazing but it was the same as any new guy would get to make him prove himself, and others who said Jackie was targeted. World War 2 is a big factor in a lot of these guys’ stories: one man said the first time he saw a major league game, he was pitching it — just a couple of months out of high school. That happened in part because so many of the players went off to war, of course. A lot of these interviews happened for the authors’ other baseball books, so it’s not the deliberately created record that Glory is. If you’re interested in mid-century baseball, this is an entertaining collection of player memories, but it’s not a patch on Glory.
Reading Freely 